Thoughts from Alexis de Tocqueville

Maybe a new series?

Mar 13, 2025

I am an inveterate note taker. Whenever I stumble across something I think I can use later, I write a note and file it. I used to do this on paper, which was not only messy but unusable in most cases, so I started using Notepad, and now have a folder with over 100 notes just waiting for me to do something with them.

I was reading some of those notes, trying to come up with a subject for today’s article, when I came across my notes from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — an excellent read, by the way.

This may be the start of another series, as the quotes from de Tocqueville can spark some pretty long remarks. Let me know if you think this is something you’d care to see.

So here is the first quote from de Tocqueville with my thoughts. His quote is in italics.

Among the gems we have from Alexis de Tocqueville, this one stands out, although he never said it. It’s a summarization of a paragraph in his seminal work Democracy in America.

“Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great…”

Are we hearing righteousness preached from the pulpits of this country?

For the most part, the answer is a resounding NO. Ever wonder why that is?

How about many of our preachers have surrendered to being popular rather than being holy? Having attended a few churches in my day, I can say with certainty that few modern preachers ever talk about sin. They talk about how Jesus loves you, and he does; however, they never mention what happens if you act on your fleshly human tendencies. When all you hear is “you’re good enough, and you’re smart enough, and people like you” the introspection needed to determine if all that’s true doesn’t happen.

Preachers need to tell their congregations what happens if they don’t do what God says. That’s not popular, so they don’t anymore.

And America may cease to be great as a result. Think about that “flame of righteousness” statement. Preachers back in the day were lock, stock, and barrel committed to telling us about the wages of sin. They don’t do that anymore. Someone forgot that without the darkness you will not know the light.

So is America a moral nation? Chances are if you’re honest you’ll have to answer no again. What’s the cause of this loss of national morality, assuming we ever were a moral people in the first place?

It has been an ongoing slog to the present state of immorality, starting July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence was written by the Founders to explain why we were separating ourselves from the Crown, and most assume leaving was a majority decision. It wasn’t. At any one time no more that 25% of the citizens of the colonies supported the Revolution. Those that didn’t worked against or at least didn’t work for, independence. So there was a lack of honesty from the start. Without honesty you’ll never have morality, and so the de Tocqueville quote.

The further America progressed, the more morality slipped, until at the end of WWII the country was ripe for a fall. The tools that accomplished that slide away from morality were the New Deal, The Great Society, and baby boomers.

The New Deal and the Great Society made dependence a part of our society, removing many of the reasons this country is great. You can read about them if you wish; however, the thrust was government regulation would take care of people instead of people taking care of people. The result was a society of entitled citizens instead of a society of citizens who worked for what they received.

The baby boomers did their part as well. A huge swelling of the population after WWII that was brought up by people who had suffered the Great Depression and fought WWII, the boomers were spoiled by the richness of the country and the largess their parents bestowed upon them to make up for the deprivation of their own youth. Boomers thought they could do no wrong, that they knew everything, and contributed to the loss of morality by their rebellion against faith and everything else society stood for. How could the God of their youth be the true God when society provided all that God promised?

That’s a coarse generalization; however, history bears it out. Attendance at church has been declining since the 1960s, with peak attendance in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Interestingly enough, that’s when boomers became adults and started to make their own lives and decisions. It seems one of those decisions was they did not need God, and the rest is history.

But why did we/they make that decision?

One is increasing secularization. Society is becoming more secular, and religion is losing its influence in public and private life. Again, the main cause of this change is government taking over responsibilities that were once the province of family and the church.

Additionally, a greater acceptance of science and technology provides alternative explanations for life’s questions previously answered by religion, although we have found over time that taking science back as far as it will go still leaves the question of “who made the mud?” Evolutionists like to say that life evolved due to a random action in a chemical soup (a mud puddle); however, they never explain where the chemical soup or the mud puddle came from. Someone or something had to create it.

Online communities and technology have also contributed to the drop in church attendance. The growth of online communities and social media offers alternative forms of social connection and support as well as online resources and digital media offering access to spiritual content without needing physical attendance at church services.

Churches have increasingly aligned with specific political ideologies that have alienated individuals who disagree politically, causing them to withdraw from attending. If the message delivered is intrinsically conservative, those having liberal beliefs are not comfortable, and if that message is changed (secularized) to make the liberal comfortable conservatives will not attend. And so churches tend to reflect the political beliefs of their congregations, and those who are in the middle, the undecided, that 60% all politicians aim for, aren’t comfortable anywhere.

So what do we do? We can hope that the current generation will mature into thinking there’s more to the world than the secular view provides and see a revitalization of church attendance. I don’t believe hope is a strategy, so although I hope for a resurgence I won’t count on it. A good start is putting God back in schools. Prayer was always part of school until recently. It should be brought back. That still won’t be enough, though.

What’s needed is another revolution. This one should be for the rights, freedoms, and independence documented in our Constitution. Before the nanny state, all the different shades of belief existed exactly as they do today. The difference is the Constitution outlines a belief in man and his ability to take care of himself and his family — a place where all the advantages anyone could want were there for the taking but you had to take them. You had to want to better yourself. No one gave you anything.

Thoughts from Alexis de Tocqueville

Maybe a new series?

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